Conceptual Balance Mod v1.92

[llamabeast]

No worries at all, decourcy. Honestly I think I managed to come across as a bit of an arse myself in this thread - I'm sorry about that. I normally make it a priority to be welcoming to new players. I just got a bit frustrated.

The isn't-affected-by-a-shield thing is a really weird quirk. Basically normally all single-target missile weapons can be stopped by shields, and all AOE weapons completely ignore shields. However when a single-target missile weapon is stopped by a shield it is stopped 100% - even a hide shield is completely effective at stopping boulders in vanilla. Sombre found some quirk where a particular weapon number (which I think is a different boulder, maybe from a fortress or something) breaks the normal rule and bypasses shields. So he and qm modified the normal boulders to use the same weapon number and hence also bypass shields.

So to summarise: the direct hit ignores shields, but is basically the only single target missile weapon in the game to do so. The AOE also bypasses shields, but that is standard behaviour.

Of course the preferred behaviour would have been for the direct hit to have its damage reduced by shields, but not completely stopped. Unfortunately that's not possible. The new behaviour seems preferable to the vanilla behaviour, where for example troops with Tower Shields were almost completely invulnerable to boulder throwers.

By the way decourcy, if you are interested in mods but aren't a fan of CBM, take a look at the Expanded Nations Packs linked in my signature (they're mostly not by me). Some of the new nations are pretty awesome. Generally they have as much content as the richest of the vanilla nations.